How to hide the mouse cursor

I'm building a kiosk using Ubuntu Precise on a touch screen. Now I'm looking for the appropriate way to make the mouse cursor disappear. As people know where they are pointing, displaying an arrow under their finger is useless, and having an arrow where they last pointed even more so.

My best bet would be some kind of cursor theme consisting only of transparent cursors. I'm a bit surprised to find no UI to switch and maybe install cursor themes in the default Unity UI, but as I won't be using Unity, that's not much of a problem. It appears that the alternatives listed in update-alternatives --list x-cursor-theme all refer to .theme files, so I searched the package list for those. The resulting list does not list any likely candidates, i.e. no packages containing “invisible” or “transparent” in their name.

So far, some googled result yielding a readme for “XCursor Transparent Theme” is my best bet. That would mean compiling those sources myself, perhaps putting them into my PPA. I'm also a bit sceptical about that result as said readme is dated from 2003. And I'm not sure that I'm not making things overly complicated. After all, there is quite some support in Precise for touch devices, so I don't believe I'm the first one who wants to get rid of his mouse cursor.

• Is there another way which doesn't involve user-compiled binary code?
• Is there a theme package for transparent cursors which I've overlooked?
• Is there some other mechanism to make the cursor disappear without changing the cursor theme?

I'll be using Matchbox WM, Firefox and Java applets, so I'll be happy with any solution working under such a setup. I'm not interested in any solutions twiddling with Gnome or Compiz, as I'll not be running either.

Try unclutter.

The purpose of this program is to hide the pointer after the mouse has not moved for a while. Using it, you can make the pointer appear only when the user touches the screen, and disappear right after it. Maybe this was not exactly what you were aiming for, but it is much easier than your alternative.

To use it, first install it:

sudo apt-get install unclutter

then run it:

unclutter -idle 0.01 -root

The number in the above command is the number of seconds before the pointer disappears (in this case, 1/100 seconds).

If you never want the cursor to appear (appropriate for touchscreens) unclutter won't suffice from my experience. Instead you can use use -nocursor when starting X.

Example:

startx -nocursor

See http://www.x.org/wiki/AdvancedTopicsFAQ/#index1h2